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Old Media Old media are back in force. Authenticists claim they have rediscovered the tools to call forth the spirit from matter once more: delicate shades of grey that flow from a pencil, the relief conjured up by oil paint, the magic of decaying nitrate films, the perennial eloquence of world literature, the astonishing relevance of ancient symbols, the sheer beauty of Bakelite phones, the elasticity of organic textiles, the ultimate poetry of typewriters, the stained-glass window's magical display of interweaving light rays. All these techniques are thought to inform us about the true nature of human life, pointing to the emptiness of the modern media world. The old tools are thought to lead us back to a universe that predates industrial media, a place where sense still made sense. In this Golden Age, in which consciousness had not yet been eroded by the blur of images or the cacaphony of radio and people still awoke each day to tune in to their cultures, pure reception observed a world of vivid forms and acoustic space was filled by the song and warble of birds (by all means worthy of rerecording). In this primeval era, there was still ample room for the message to contain secrets, not interpretations. Although contact with the gods had been lost after Homer, one could still profess faith in the deceased geniuses as a longing for the most ancient of media. Furthermore, there remained the possible miracle of spirit merging with matter to produce the perfect work of art. To be misunderstood by one's contemporaries was not a case of failed marketing strategies or of malafide agents taking the loot, but a quintessential feature of genius. One could still be unrecognized instead of just uninteresting. Today Manhattan harbors 100,000 painters, more than the entire globe had back then. In those days, there was still room for artisanship, for masters and apprentices, lunatic rulers dishing out ducats, bishops requesting new opuses by the week. Flourishing cultures produced masterpieces, masterpieces caused cultures to flourish; who wouldn't like to set their time machines for such space-time coordinates?

The authentic artist's charge against pulp culture is that civilization gets the art it deserves. Artists who exploit this state of affairs are celebrated as enlightened thinkers. Authenticists with an ironic understanding of contemporary profundities transform their cultural discomfort into works of artisanal banality, and are liberally rewarded for their efforts by investors. Others use their authentic reappraisal of outdated techniques as a sales technique. Their convincing presentations offer welcome relief from the collection of postmodern curiosities, which owes its existence to overinterpretation. The most inaccessible regions of the sublime have been democratized, yet our artists succeed in reactivating an exalted remainder. Deconstructed fragments are spontaneously shattered in their hands, revealing a landscape of true images. All those French reflections on language, signs, simulations, fractal power, result in the conservation of forgotten or lost destinies as truth and labor. Old media are not aware of their purity. They are here to stay. Once the media, always the media. Ornate instruments have no quarrel with wax cylinders or CDs. It would be more consistent of the authentic performers if they would render their historical timbre only within the old medium of the parlor, and tried to convince us that microphones cause their viola da gambas and hammer dulcimers to go out of tune. Even if medial disruption of the instruments could be scientifically proven, and this knowledge converted into a truly authentic sound, the essence of the thing would never penetrate the ear molded to media. Even authentic art performances cannot exist without recording and reproduction. The old-music circles lack the will to dissociate themselves from the media. Since contemporary concert halls no longer regulate admission (unlike European squatter's bars, which have banned recording equipment), they

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are deprived of premedial ambiance. By reproducing ancient charisma through state-of-the-art techniques, the authenticists automatically end up as folklorists; the end point of all culture, the repository of old media, out of which they can celebrate their comeback in the new. By nature, media seek to associate with their peers. Old media will not be forced back into a historical village, like cute old handicrafts, wielding the same brief power of nostalgia as a spinning wheel in action. The old media are as intoxicating and empty as the new playthings. Their age is no guarantee of wisdom. Nor can we accuse the old media of dull or demented behavior. Their chronicling continues; they perceive with the one sense to which they have been doomed. With a little exercise, old media may serve us just fine, amidst all the contemporary telematic machinery. The hybrid character of media means that anything can be linked to anything. In posthistory, the opposite is equally true. The cinema has always shown great interest in the dressed-up past. Visconti's extras were not just required to wear original attire; he forced them to wear corresponding underwear, supposedly conducive to the old ways of moving. Likewise, Stanley Kubrick thought it necessary to shoot "Barry Lyndon" using late eighteenth-century candlelight, for which he had to develop a special kind of highly sensitive film. Techno artists also exhibit a persistent urge to prove they can make real music on stage. The latest trend is movie adaptations of computer games. Soundtracks often far exceed actual movie popularity, and may even lead to the rerelease of pictures that were otherwise complete failures. Any major picture worth its salt appears as a novel soon after. Due to overwhelming response, the video clip is now available on compact disc. Now all we have to wait for is a video game adaptation of Rilke's "Neue Gedichte." Have you read "Cyberspace: The Manual" yet? To say that interactive CDs are making world literature more accessible is stating the obvious. Great literature has always been interactive. Only those who failed to comprehend it ever thought of it in terms of CD-ROM. This memory-only attitude considers the past a closed area, inaccessible to data input. Things only get going once media are falsely hooked up. Only misconnections can produce sparks. Old media should be treated as RAM and accessed at random. Data processing is unthinkable without the use of old media. They supply the materials to be processed. Computer peripherals are meant to absorb this material. There's a whole world waiting to be scanned. Only when the computer world has liberated itself of all its peripheral equipment, and the central processing unit functions autonomously, will the status of old media ever change. Only then will the computer create an intractable data world in which the human archive has been fully assimilated. At present, integrated circuits still need TV screens to communicate progress, and printouts on their performance are still available. Only when computers refuse to tell us what data manipulations have been carried out will they have become a pure metamedium. The possibility informs fears about the artificial intelligence of neural networks. The question remains, however, to what extent the recording frenzy that underlies the construction of this giga-databank can ever be exhausted. The ideal of a comprehensive archive dates back to the eighteenth century at least. The twentieth century needed a world war to keep up with the pace of worldly dynamics in an open archive. War was the ideal condition for the brutal introduction of revolutionary recording techniques. But we do not have to follow this military storage strategy in order to maintain the status quo. The old media archives may continue to exist (or perish) freely, unabsorbed by cyberspace. A more subtle option is to have the media do as they please, forming multirational links as they see fit in a "personal network" of old and new media, not necessarily interlacing but possibly compatible. The user

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as a disturbance variable occasionally interferes with the sublime operations of the autonomous matrix. Only technocrats dream of perfectly integrated media systems, of ISDN as the generator of absolute transparence. Deficient conversion techniques guarantee that the mystery of technology will remain, even for the most brilliant of cybernauts. Malfunction is their only food for thought. It's when the control panel flares red that the console prankster comes to life. ??

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